A Hidden History of Unhappiness

A Hidden History of UnhappinessIn A Fortunate Man, his account of the six weeks he spent shadowing the doctor John Sassall in the village of St Briavels in the Forest of Dean in the summer of 1966, John Berger writes that unhappiness is like illness in that 'it too exacerbates a sense of uniqueness'.Many of those who came to Sassall's surgery, as in doctors' surgeries everywhere, were not just ill but incurably lonely, fearful and sad.With an unhappy patient, Berger reflected, the doctor's task was to recognise the person behind the illness.This act of recognition could help to defeat a sense of hopelessness and offer at least 'the chance of being happy'.For the patient to feel recognised, the doctor had to appear to them as a comparable person, an 'ideal brother'.Sassall (a pseudonym) was known in the community as a good doctor because he met this 'deep but unformulated expectation of the sick for a sense of fraternity'.In witnessing their sorrow, he lessened the tendency of human frustration to 'magnify its own dissimilarity and so nourish itself'. 1 As Berger discovered in Sassall's consulting room, people feel intensely the singularity of their own unhappiness, in a way that drowns out wider explanations.'With the fatal a-historical basis of our culture', he writes, 'we tend to overlook or ignore the historical content of neurosis or mental illness […] Vulnerability may have its own private causes, but it often reveals concisely what is wounding and damaging on a much larger scale'.Sassall rarely referred a patient to a mental hospital, considering it 'a kind of abandonment'.In the evenings after supper, though, he had hour-long sessions with 'patients he believes he can help through psychotherapy'.2 His own deep depressions derived in part from his sense of powerlessness in the face of his patients' problems, at a time when GPs were legally responsible for their care, twenty-four hours a day, all year round.This essay traces a history of how we have understood acute unhappiness in Britain in the sixty years since A Fortunate Man was published.I know I am risking vagueness in adopting Berger's deliberately unmedicalised term, 'unhappiness'.